Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Fannie Mae settles discrimination lawsuit brought by Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council and others.
Among the 330 properties in Milwaukee which were analyzed as part of the investigation:
Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court allows Alabama to use maps that lower court found biased against Black voters. In a written opinion, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the lower court blocked Alabama's map too close to the 2022 election, contravening Supreme Court precedent. . . . Liberal Justice Elena Kagan called the decision "badly wrong" and, referring to the Voting Rights Act, said the high court's action "forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution." Her dissent was joined by fellow liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. . . . In his dissent, (Chief Justice John) Roberts wrote that the lower court "properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction." National Catholic Reporter: Study shows that even after Trump presidency immigrants fear use of public benefits. "Yes, I'm aware the public charge act has been rescinded by the Biden administration, but people still think it is not safe," said one immigrant who participated in the study. "People will tell you, 'Yes, but you never know when [the rule could] come back.' They say they don't want to jeopardize their chances of bringing their children, so they want to focus on the bigger picture as opposed to some money." The Detroit News: Second member in plot to kidnap Michigan's governor to plead guilty. Marijuana Moment: Pennsylvania legislative committee discusses legalizing recreational marijuana use.
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Wispolitics.com: Milwaukee County Board passes resolution for free or low-cost prison calls.
WTMJ: Wisconsin Supreme Court declines ballot-box case. Slate: Biden's vow to nominate a Black woman has tokenized any nominee What would have been the harm in Biden simply nominating a Black woman for the court, without the premature, identity-specific fanfare? What if he hadn’t told everyone, before he’d even picked her—indeed, before he’d even been elected—that she’d only bested other Black women for the role, rather than the entire pool of possible nominees? Wouldn’t she have been better served by the perception that Biden had also considered white men for the slot, and found them wanting in comparison? Forbes: Calls for an ethics code at the U.S. Supreme Court. More than two dozen legal ethics scholars asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Thursday to impose a code of conduct for the court’s judges, as the conservative-leaning court faces declining public trust and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas spark new ethics concerns. Associated Press: Investigation of abuse at federal women's facility in California. An Associated Press investigation has found a permissive and toxic culture at the Bay Area lockup, enabling years of sexual misconduct by predatory employees and cover-ups that have largely kept the abuse out of the public eye. Tenth Amendment Center: Bill filed in Hawaii legislature to ban no-knock warrants. By Gretchen Schuldt
Milwaukee's "ban" on no-knock search warrants "sent a message to its citizens that the safety of known violent criminals is more important than the innocent public," according to a state representative seeking to reverse the restrictions. State Rep. Ron Tusler (R-Harrison) is the Assembly author of Assembly Bill 834, which would prohibit local limitations on no-knock warrants. Search warrants, under the bill, could be served as no-knocks based on an officer's "reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing his or her presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile or would inhibit the effective investigation of the crime." The bill was approved by the Assembly and is pending in the Senate. While the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission said that it completely banned no-knock search warrants in November, it did not do so. As WJI and the Marquette University Diederich College of Communication previously reported, no-knocks still are available for city police officers working with multi-agency task forces and it is very common for Milwaukee police officers to participate on the task forces or special units. And suburban police investigating a drug crime that spills over into Milwaukee face no prohibition on requesting a no-knock for a Milwaukee residence unless their own communities have banned them. Milwaukee police, with permission from departmental higher-ups, may participate in no-knocks conducted by outside agencies other than task forces. The Wisconsin Police Chiefs Association, like Tusler, submitted comments for consideration at a public hearing on the bill before the Assembly Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. "Cities around the country and here in Wisconsin have begun enacting policies that ban no-knock search warrants from being used," the Association said. "This policy change by local governments is dangerous for responding officers and citizens alike." "Nationally, and among certain pockets of Wisconsin, no-knock search warrants have been demonized by the anti-police mob," said State Sen. Van H. Wanggaard (R-Racine), Senate author of the bill. "These opponents have willfully cast no-knocks in a bad light through misunderstanding and willful misstatements of facts." A national anti-no-knock movement flared in early 2020 after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor during a botched drug raid. In Milwaukee, the debate over no-knocks also was influenced by the killing of Milwaukee Police Officer Matthew Rittner in 2019. He was shot while he and other officers were trying to enter a drug suspect’s home with a battering ram while carrying out a no-knock search. "Although it is preferable to mitigate threats that would justify a no-knock warrant, sometimes it is unavoidable to meet an immediate law enforcement objective," said Ryan Windorff, president of the Wisconsin State Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police. "There has been much discussion about no-knock search warrants after recent high-profile incidents but no collective data about their use and their outcomes." Windorff said his organization supported data collection on no-knocks. Only the City of Milwaukee submitted testimony in opposition to the bill. No other individual testified or registered against the measure. "This legislation is another prime example of supposed 'local control' being overridden by the Legislature," the city said. "The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, after significant community and law enforcement input, and public discussion, voted in a public meeting on Nov. 18th to outlaw no-knock search warrants....Reversing this decision through AB834 is a move in the wrong direction and is a direct disregard of the authority and independence of Fire and Police Commissions throughout the State." Other organizations favoring the bill were the Badger State Sheriffs' Association, the Milwaukee Police Association, and the Wisconsin Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs Association. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Judge dismisses Wauwatosa curfew case but allows plaintiffs to replead the complaint.
Madison.com: Pushback on bill to strip parental rights from those in prison. NBC: Progressive prosecutors blocked by tough-on-crime legislators. “Prosecutors seeking to reform the system or address racial inequities are being targeted by partisan legislators,” said James Woodall, a public policy associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “This bill is an attempt to take away their discretion.” Vox: Financial help for those released from prison in Florida. A new pilot program is now pushing guaranteed income into a new frontier by focusing on a potentially controversial constituency: formerly incarcerated people. The outcome of the program may help define the political bounds of just giving people money. Nation of Change: Lawsuits put a price on climate damage. The New York Times: Thoughts and a podcast on the U.S. Supreme Court mistakes regarding rights. “Getting race wrong early has led courts to get everything else wrong since,” writes Jamal Greene. But he probably doesn’t mean what you think he means. Greene is a professor at Columbia Law School, and his book “How Rights Went Wrong” is filled with examples of just how bizarre American Supreme Court outcomes have become. An information processing company claims the right to sell its patients’ data to drug companies — it wins. A group of San Antonio parents whose children attend a school with no air-conditioning, uncertified teachers and a falling apart school building sue for the right to an equal education — they lose. A man from Long Island claims the right to use his homemade nunchucks to teach the “Shafan Ha Lavan” karate style, which he made up, to his children — he wins. Third of three stories. Marijuana was the second most-common target in residential drug searches conducted by police in Milwaukee County in 2019, well behind cocaine but ahead of heroin, a review of search warrant filings found. Trailing far behind and seldom searched for were meth, opiate painkillers, and Ecstasy, according to an analysis by Marquette University journalists. Rarely was marijuana – which Milwaukee County and many municipalities have taken steps to decriminalize – the sole drug targeted by police in a particular raid. That was the case in just 11 of 433 drug search warrants carried out at Milwaukee County addresses in 2019. That year was chosen for the review because it was the most recent year unaffected by the COVID pandemic, which affected law enforcement and court operations. But marijuana was in the search mix in 54% of warrant requests, most of them by Milwaukee police and multi-agency drug task forces. Here’s the breakdown of how often police targeted each drug in the 433 searches:
Police reported nabbing 26 pounds of pot on a summer day in 2019 at a home on Milwaukee’s northwest side, but court records show no charges against the suspect until a separate incident in 2021.
In south suburban Greenfield, police investigated alleged gang members and made multiple arrests on marijuana, heroin and cocaine charges with help from a home search following neighborhood complaints in 2019. No matter the drug, searches of residences were pretty effective in finding potentially incriminating evidence. Police found drugs in at least two out of every three residential searches (67%). (Excludes canine drug sniffs outside homes.) Sloppy or inconsistent reporting by police on public search warrant documents makes that statistic a little squishy. The actual number is likely higher. Sometimes police report finding evidence but don’t attach the inventory or otherwise specify results. The “success” rate in finding evidence rises to 81% when including things such as weapons, drug paraphernalia, ammunition, and business records of dealing. (Again excluding the sniffs.) Nearly every canine “odor search” included pot as a target in 2019, the review found. That might be changing for some police departments as marijuana legalization spreads in the U.S. – though not yet in Wisconsin. “Many jurisdictions that are buying drug dogs now are not having those drug dogs trained to detect marijuana, in anticipation of potential legalization in this state,” said South Milwaukee Police Chief William Jessup. “If you have a dog that's trained to detect marijuana, you can't untrain that dog,” he added. Jessup said South Milwaukee police are moving away from doing odor searches for marijuana. What is the track record of “Bravo” and “Rex” and all those other drug-sniffing dogs that local police have reported using outside residences to build a case for doing a search of a residence? The Marquette review found that in odor searches, police report the dog almost unfailingly found the presence of drugs. Police used positive dog hits to beef up their applications for far more intrusive search warrants. But the accuracy of police dogs has been questioned, and studies have shown that there are a significant number of false alerts – enough to raise questions about the usefulness of any single drug sniff. The Marquette review found less interest in marijuana searches by anti-drug task forces that go after higher-level drug traffickers and employ officers from multiple agencies – local, state and federal. The individual municipal police departments that conducted searches – and not all of them did – showed more interest in searching for pot. Associated Press: Voces de la Frontera allowed to join lawsuit challenging subpoenas.
Dane County Circuit Judge Rhonda Lanford on Wednesday granted the Voces de la Frontera request, saying the issues at play were sufficiently similar and that the group’s interests were distinct enough to warrant it. “It makes no sense to this court to expend more judicial resources and more taxpayer dollars to challenge these subpoenas in a separate lawsuit given all of their similarities,” Lanford ruled. Westport News (AP report): Republicans propose another state constitutional amendment, this time on grants to fund elections. Wisconsin Republicans on Wednesday proposed making it unconstitutional to accept private grant money to help administer elections, the latest front in the ongoing battle over how to run elections in the presidential battleground state. . . . The amendment addresses a Republican complaint about grant money that came to Wisconsin in 2020 from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is funded by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The state's five largest cities received $8.8 million but more than 200 communities in Wisconsin received funding as part of $350 million given out nationally. Colorado Politics: Proposed Colorado bill to automatically seal records of nonviolent offenses. Senate Bill 22-099 would implement an automatic sealing process for non-violent criminal records, including civil infractions, by expanding an existing automatic sealing process exclusive to certain drug offenses. The legislation would apply to those who are eligible to request record sealing under the current system, meaning they have finished their sentence, completed a required waiting period and have not committed another criminal offense. Truthout: The impact of COVID in youth facilities. The Omicron variant brought a predictable spike in COVID cases inside prisons for children and teens. In response to to these spikes, juvenile facilities have limited educational and recreational activities, and suspended in-person visitation, further isolating incarcerated youth and increasing costs for anxious parents who are desperately trying to look out for their children. NPR: Mississippi legalizes medical marijuana. Associated Press: Wisconsin Republicans consider constitutional amendment changing bail.
Groups are lining up in opposition to the bail amendment. The state public defender’s office warned in written remarks to the Senate judiciary committee last month that the changes would result in more pretrial detentions of people who are supposed to be presumed innocent and don’t pose a serious risk to the community, as well as court officials setting excessive bail amounts. . . . Craig Johnson, president of the board of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that works to ensure defendants are treated fairly, acknowledged in written remarks to the Assembly committee that the parade deaths have sent a “shockwave” across the state. But the problem wasn’t that no one assessed Brooks’ risk to the community — an evaluation was indeed done — but that no one saw it, Johnson said. “We must remember,” he wrote, “that unnecessary pretrial detention has societal costs and creates a two-tiered justice system — one for the rich, and one for the poor.” WHBL: Proposed bill to lower threshold for felony theft in Wisconsin. WSLS: Looking beyond Harvard and Yale for the next Supreme Court justice. The Guardian: Michigan's citizen-generated maps earn an A rating; Wisconsin's don't. Neither party was involved in drawing (Michigan's) new maps, a process that is open to abuse if politicians are allowed to allocate particular voters to particular districts in order to guarantee a win there. Instead, the responsibility fell to 13 Michiganders – four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents – who were randomly selected by the state. The Michigan Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission (MICRC) includes a foster care worker, a retired banker, an aspiring orthopedic surgeon, a mother of six, a college student and a real estate broker. MICRC, and the approach it epitomizes, came about thanks to Katie Fahey, a Michigan resident and political novice who posted a message on Facebook two days after the 2016 presidential election. She said she wanted to take on gerrymandering and eventually recruited more than 14,000 volunteers to campaign for an amendment to the state’s constitution. It passed with 61% of the vote and created the commission, one of the most successful ways to unrig the redistricting process so far and a potential model for other states. Princeton Gerrymandering Project: Check the partisan skew of each state's redistricting maps. Capital B: The effects in Illinois of the ban on Pell grants for incarcerated people. Congress reversed the ban in March 2021 as part of the COVID-19 relief package. But experts say denying education grants to potentially hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people – a population that is disproportionately Black – not only made it harder for them to find jobs and more likely to return to prison, it also contributed to economic stagnation in the neighborhoods to which many return. The Department of Education has until July 2023 to restore Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students. Some colleges already are collaborating with prison systems through an experimental Pell program that the Obama Administration began in 2015. But only about 200 degree-granting schools – or about 4% – offered credit coursework to the incarcerated as of 2018. CNN: Increased gun violence and use of ghost guns. Law enforcement officials and gun violence prevention groups have sounded the alarm on the fast-growing threat of unregulated ghost guns. There is no background check required to purchase the parts needed to assemble a firearm at home, which can be done in less than an hour, and often at a low cost. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Common Council committee approves $650,000 settlement in Milwaukee police shooting case.
Wisconsin Public Radio: UW System Prison Education Initiative gains momentum. A two-year push to make college education more accessible to Wisconsin inmates has gained momentum with nearly $6 million in public and private grants. The funding will help matriculate inmates and "break the back of recidivism," Tommy Thompson, University of Wisconsin System interim president and former governor, said. CNN: How Justice Breyer's departure may change Court dynamics. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor would gain new power, Justice Elena Kagan will likely recalibrate her negotiating style and Chief Justice John Roberts may have less chance for compromise. NBC: Alabama asks U.S. Supreme Court to let it use maps that lower court struck down. The Soapbox: The Ninth Circuit Trump judge ranting about colleagues and calling precedent silly. (Federal Circuit Judge Lawrence) VanDyke’s behavior on the Ninth Circuit may have been predictable, then, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling. In one immigration case, VanDyke accused other Ninth Circuit judges of “barely disguised shenanigans” and “mischief,” while in another he called circuit precedent “silly” and said the court had a “nasty habit of muddling immigration law.” Last August, when the Ninth Circuit refused to review a three-judge panel decision in a habeas corpus case, he strenuously criticized his colleagues for not reversing the panel’s ruling. He compared the other judges to “a sullen kid who spits in the cookie jar after being caught red-handed,” referring to the Supreme Court’s record of overturning Ninth Circuit habeas rulings. “To give credit where credit is due: my diligent clerk did prepare a very nice string-cite spanning multiple pages,” he said of the list of reversals. “But including it felt awkward—like trying to shame a career offender with his rap sheet.” What a way to describe your co-workers. Second of three stories When police enter Milwaukee County homes without notice or invitation to search for evidence in the war on drugs, they overwhelmingly target low-income and predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city of Milwaukee. Nine of every 10 drug searches in 2019 were in the city rather than suburbs, and 75% of properties searched were occupied by Black residents, according to a new analysis by Marquette University journalists of every residential drug search in the county that year, the last before the pandemic curtailed many law enforcement activities. In the somewhat rare instances of police searching the properties of White suspected dealers, they found illegal drugs slightly more often than at Black-occupied places subjected to searches (76% to 71%), the Marquette investigation found. There were 433 drug searches in the county in 2019, or more than one a day. Given their geographic concentration, it’s safe to say that some ZIP codes in Milwaukee’s central city have seen many hundreds, even a thousand drug raids or more since drug enforcement ramped up starting in the 1970s. More than half of drug searches (222) were in Milwaukee, concentrated in six ZIP codes, five on the north side and 1 on the near south side. They are 53206, 53209, 53212, 53204, 53210, and 53208. Together, they accounted for 51% of the drug searches in Milwaukee County. Every case was different but details repeated: tips to police, drug buys by frequent informants, surveillance, allegations of violence, evidence fished from garbage outside suspected drug houses. In Riverwest, police targeted a guy with a prior drug record but came up empty in a search. Near North 5th Street and West Capitol Drive, a search netted 100 grams of cocaine, criminal charges, and a conviction. Some days brought as many as three or four searches; on others, none. Weapons were frequent companions to drugs, turning up nearly half the time in these searches. In 2019, weapons – mostly firearms ranging from handguns to assault rifles – were found significantly more often in searches involving Black suspects than suspects of other races (48% to 38%). Police more frequently searched Black-occupied properties for weapons (66% to 46%), the Marquette analysis found. Police and prosecutors in part explain the disparities by saying they focus on drug dealing, not possession, and that drug sales in predominantly Black, lower-income neighborhoods are more public and generate more violence and neighborhood complaints than in wealthier areas. It’s common for far-suburban drug users to drive into the city or adjacent suburbs to buy and then return home to use. It’s about economic ability -- the fact that somebody who lives in a million-dollar suburban house isn’t going to be dealing drugs out of the house and also can easily get drugs, said William Jessup, a longtime Milwaukee police assistant chief and current chief in suburban South Milwaukee. “They just have to drive somewhere to get it, or call somebody to have them delivered,” Jessup said. In the view of police-reform activists, politics plays a role. Decisions by lawmakers, police and prosecutors to punish some crimes and not others and penalize some drug crimes more heavily than others shows that determining who is a “criminal” is a political decision.
“It’s a decision of who is policed, and who is punished,” said Devin Anderson, who has coordinated the LiberateMKE campaign to reduce the size of the Milwaukee police budget. He is a manager at the African American Roundtable. Jessup said that while working under Edward Flynn, Milwaukee’s police chief from 2008-2018, the department determined that it was conducting too many police searches of homes every year, considering the results and costs. They cut back on drug raids, he said. Still, in 2019, police in the county conducted 433 drug raids on properties. Milwaukee police dominated the action, along with special state-federal task forces that go after higher-level narcotics organizations with assistance from MPD and other locals. But in the two years since 2019, the number of drug search warrants in Milwaukee County fell dramatically, down to 279 in 2021, coinciding with the COVID-19 crisis and the racial reckoning following the killings of Breonna Taylor during a botched police raid in Kentucky and George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis. An MPD spokesperson, Sgt. Efrain Cornejo, said there was no particular reason for the drop, and that police continue to support the effort against drug trafficking. Economics lesson Despite police success in using searches to arrest drug suspects, some with experience in law say America can’t arrest its way out of the drug problem. The root problem is that drug dealing is still attractive in areas where jobs and opportunities are less available, said David Budde, who worked eight years in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Drug Unit conducting drug investigations. “It’s about a lack of economic health,” Budde said. “Why do men and women deal drugs? It’s the lure of easy money.” In the most-searched Milwaukee zip code, the average income per-capita was just $13,743. |
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